Escape from Traumaville

Thursday, 8 December 2016

You know how the game serves us. It
has a definite social purpose. Nations are bankrupt, gone. No poverty, no
sickness. Man has accomplished what he’d always craved. Corporate society was
an inevitable destiny. The good life. A centuries’ old dream.

Rollerball
(1975)

You’d better do as you’re told,
Jonathan. That’s all I have to say.

Rollerball
(1975)

In 1975 I
went on a date to the cinema in the town in which I went to school. I went with
a pretty Irish girl called Moira, taller than me and intent on getting as much
kissing and petting in as possible during the time allowed. She chose the film
we were to see, and she chose wrong.

Rollerball
captured my attention from the
opening sequence. Don’t watch the remake, which has been stuffed with now-obligatory
minorities and favoured gender roles, but do see the original. There are black
men in the original, yet it somehow doesn’t make the film reek of contemporary
Hollywood identity politics.

The movie is
an adaptation of a short story, Rollerball
Murder, with the screenplay by the author William Harrison. James Caan
plays the central character, Jonathan E, and I had forgotten that there is also
a cameo for Sir Ralph Richardson, one of England’s finest actors.

The premise
is simple. In the future – 2018, amusingly enough – there is no more war. There
is only Rollerball. The game is violent and, for the era, high-tech. An oval,
bevelled pitch, much like a truncated cycling velodrome, is used to propel a
cannonball-like steel sphere which must be thrust into a magnetic goal.
Motorcycles are used to give the roller-bladed offensive players momentum.
Death is a regular occurrence. Jonathan E’s best friend, Moonpie, ends up in a
coma.

In the
opening game sequence, Jonathan E’s mighty Houston take on Madrid. Rollerball
is a full-contact sport. Studded leather gloves are crunched into faces.
Motorcycles are driven over prone bodies. Full drop-kicks to the face are
deployed. A three-minute penalty might result from a particular act of
savagery. Jonathan E is Houston captain, top-scorer and all-round Christiano
Ronaldo without the full body waxing.

The impetus
to the plot is that Jonathan E becomes bigger than the game itself, and thus
writes himself out of the corporate script of the game’s overlords. They gradually
alter the rules before arranging a final game in which there are no rules and
no time limits, the obvious aim being to kill Jonathan. I won’t write a spoiler
in case you haven’t see the movie, but there is no dialogue in the final few
minutes, and the final scene, with the crowd chanting – complete with
Truffautesque freeze-frame – is quite wonderful. The remake has got all the
crappy rap-metal and racket you would expect. The Norman Jewison original
begins with Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D
Minor and was the first time I had heard Albinoni’s haunting Adagio in G Minor. Classical music in a
film always speaks of low budget because classical music is free to use, and
many movies have benefited from not having the latest crap ringing in the
viewer’s ears but, instead, real, white music.

There is a
brilliant scene in Rollerball in which Jonathan E and his girlfriend discuss
comfort versus freedom, and she says that ‘comfort is freedom’. Incidentally,
the film was shot in England and Munich, and the scene looks to me very much as
though it was shot in England’s beautiful New Forest.

Comfort is
freedom. That could be the equation that dooms the West. Comfort actually
breeds laziness and genetic retardation. Read The Bell Curve, and you will understand how a lack of comfort, the
challenge of trying to bring ease to existence in cold climes, for example, is
exactly what leads to cortical development, at least when extended over the
universal time frame in which Darwinian evolution is played out. This is why
the colder parts of the planet have seen the most technological innovation. The
higher brain was forced to do more work, and thus developed at a greater rate
and to a greater level.

Now, I’m
always wary of symbolism. Just as Eastern philosophy was always too easy for
hippies to like, so too symbolism gives Critical Studies students a big
play-pen and toy-box with which to say this means that and that means this.
That said, it is tempting to look at who today is becoming bigger than the game,
who is our Jonathan E. There is a small genre of films whose protagonists
outgrow the system which sustains them, and that growth becomes their hubris. Citizen Kane, Network, Apocalypse
Now, Scarface; all these films feature figures hunted down by the system
they tried to over-reach.

So
if we were to look for our latter-day Jonathan E, we could do worse than look
at Time magazine’s person of the
year, Donald Trump. Certainly, the establishment has created a great game but,
unlike Rollerball, it is malevolent while seeming benevolent.

Trump has
already shown that he is bigger than the rigged game which was supposed to see
Jeb Bush lose with dignity to Hillary Clinton. For this, the establishment is
unlikely to forgive him. As Ann Coulter writes;

“On immigration, Trump will be furiously opposed by: Democrats,
Republicans, the permanent bureaucracy, the Chamber of Commerce, George Soros,
The Wall Street Journal — in fact, the entire media, except four webpages, six
bloggers and five talk-radio hosts — and hundreds of taxpayer-funded immigrant
grievance groups. And that’s just off the top of my head.”

Jonathan E begins
to incur the wrath of the corporations when he tries ordering books only to
find there aren’t really any left. A university in the USA – Virginia Tech, I
think - just banned Huckleberry Finn and
To Kill A Mockingbird over racist
concerns. I know. To Kill A Mockingbird. The great anti-racism book. Is. Now. Racist. They
will ban Uncle Tom’s Cabin soon
because Harriet Beecher Stowe was white.

Then Jonathan
starts asking questions about how corporate decisions are made. I see a lot of
similarities with Trump, and I’m looking forward to his smashing his leather,
studded glove into the heart of the Washington establishment before ramming home the steel
ball into the goal represented by the hideous hit-mob Coulter has outlined
above.

Rollerball
is something of a modern parable. Don’t
get bigger than the game, it says. Don’t ask questions, just play to the
audience. It is the audience, in fact, that scares the corporations in the
movie, their love of Jonathan. And, in what I promise is my last act of
symbolism today, Jonathan E’s trusted right-hand man, Moonpie, is known as the
old swooper, barrelling down the slope to kung-fu kick some hapless opponent.
Trump’s help from the Alt-Right, perchance? From Breitbart? As mentioned,
Moonpie ends up in a vegetative state. Watch out. Alt-Right outlets will be
every bit as persecuted as Donald Trump. One of Trump's biggest challenges will be stopping Obama and Merkel's plan to take away the internet from those who don't use it in the approved way, people like me and you.

2017 will be
an interesting year. The referee is now
ready for the firing of the test ball…

The Collapse.
The Great Collapse. The Reckoning.
The Downfall. All sounds a bit hokey and Hollywood, doesn’t it? What words do
we have for what may very well be coming down the pike, as the north Americans
say? We require something which would encapsulate the very real possibility of Guillaume
Faye’s convergence of catastrophes. Would Faye lend us The Convergence,
perhaps? The Great Convergence. I
quite liked The Dysfunct for a while (my own, I think), but it came to seem
like a dance song by Kraftwerk. The Ending? Oh, please. Next it will be The End of Days or The Day of Judgement.
I’m happy to steal a title from David Byrne. The Overload, then.

Let us grant
that it would be economic to begin with. In the same way that 9/11 was a plane
crash in the technical sense, so too the coming overload might be described as
a financial crisis, in the technical sense. The financial overlord of the EU
has just intimated that he would like EU control of all member state budgets,
so as to be able to funnel more money into the black hole of EU finances. This
is an institution which famously has not had its accounts signed off by a bona fide international accountancy
watchdog for the better part of two decades. What does this tell us? If the EU
were a homeowner, the bailiffs would be inserting a steel-capped toe between
the door and the jamb. It is all a matter of what you choose to believe,
because we are famously ‘post-truth’ now, but I believe the overload is coming
and, to paraphrase Faye, the magic will soon be gone. We are certainly no
longer in Kansas, Toto.

Economists
are astrologers without even the basic tools of astronomy. Even disagreements
among them may be yet another example of the illusory opposition between a
right and a left which nowhere exist but have become titular, house badges in a
poorly run school. But what even the most weasel-like, agenda-driven Leftist,
Keynesian economic guru cannot deny is that we are in the middle of the largest
and riskiest fiscal experiment in the history of civilisation, if that is what
we are still entitled to call ourselves.

National debt
is by no means a new phenomenon. But it is always presented in such a way as to
see as though it were an advantage to have it. I wrote a review of Dr. Lee
Rotherham’s A Fate Worse Than Debt here at The
Commentator magazine, and had this to say;

“What A Fate Worse than Debt reminds us
is who our enemies are. Using the model of the banking system and its recent
collapse as a starting-point, the book reveals that although bankers acted
recklessly and in tune with their hyper-acquisitive natures, the fault line
runs through politics and its corrupt modern practices. The real cause of the
coming financial catastrophe is the political class. Tweedledum will take
fiscal credit today for electoral advantage even if it means ruin tomorrow
when, hopefully, Tweedledee will be in charge.”

Debt is
staggering, both in Europe and the United States of America. I once spoke to a
banker and asked him whether, effectively, it was possible to keep kicking the
can down the road with debt, whether this self-supporting and counter-intuitive
house of cards could keep standing as the wind got up. Absolutely, he said. He
was also an aficionado of cocaine, so
make of that what you will.

There is a curious feel to the West just
now. With a ground note of decline and fall, hints of economic and social
collapse, and overtones of Weimar, we watch the press and MSM desperately
trying to divert our attention to the tawdry panem et circenses on offer in order that we avert our eyes from
the twilight of the idle, the coming Götterdamerung.
What forms might this potential Ragnarok
take?

Firstly, social collapse. It is a
strange month that passes without images of Molotov-cocktail and stone-throwing
citizens of one or another disaffected country adorning print and screen. The
BBC went predictably over the top about the so-called Arab Spring, and then
what emerged from the mess was just the usual Islamic chaos and incoherence.
Like all muddle-headed liberal-Leftists, the BBC will continue to cheer on the
Muslim Brotherhood and their allies, bothered only slightly by the illiberal,
anti-gay, anti-women, anti-freedom, nihilistic, death-cult beliefs of these
de-evolutionists. For the UK's ‘state broadcaster’ - a sort of Pravda in Prada –
cognitive dissonance means never having to say you’re sorry.

And the Meditteranean countries haven’t
even really begun throwing rocks yet. Now that the Greeks, Spanish, Portugese
and Italians – and soon the French – are beginning to realise that the years
they have spent with their hairy arses in a bucket of public-sector cream will
have to be paid for, they will not go gently into that good night. The Italian
referendum has just ended the career of one of the more egregiously
technocratic EU political appointments and, although Austria has doomed itself
to Islamic invasion and a Green lunatic at the helm, we can expect more
domino-tumbling in the months and years to come.

Elsewhere – in the UK, Germany and
Sweden, for example – the deliberate importation of unassimilable populations
into the heart of the yeomanry will soon have the effect the political elites
desire; inter-ethnic and inter-cultural rioting. This will then enable them to
ratchet up their totalitarian fantasies and turn them into reality. We told you
that you were racist, and we were right, which is why you are now being
watched. And still water-cannon and sound-cannon are being stockpiled. The UK
government will never use chemical weapons on its populace, but it will use
lawfare.

But if the ATMs dry up, as they have in
India recently, there will be no pay for the police. What then? Successive
governments have already forced police morale to a suicidally low point. Police in
Sweden are leaving in droves. Some German police officers have dared to speak
out about the deteriorating situation there. French police officers and support
services have been on strike regularly, although that is not something you will
know if you confine your news harvest to the BBC or CNN. Fake news is not only what
is put out, it is also what is withheld.

In normal circumstances, I stifle a yawn
in the presence of prophets of doom. Now I find I have become one. The overload
is, I believe, very real, and it is coming soon to a society and economy near
you.

Monday, 5 December 2016

In Patrick
Keiller’s beautiful film Robinson in
Space, a pub sign is shown hanging outside a hostelry in Gravesend, England.
The film, a haunting sentimental journey intruded on by the ogres of modernity,
shows the creaking, old-fashioned swinging sign outside a pub called The World’s End. The painting shows a
Crusader ship, flying the famous red cross epaté,
falling off the edge of the world. A Muslim cleric once demanded the withdrawal
of the Hollywood film Gravity due to
its depiction of the world as round, contrary to the cosmology (such as it is)
of the Koran. While this may have been a simple exercise in promoting brand
awareness – something else the Islamic world has adapted from the West as part
of its ongoing cultural appropriation – it still reminds us that we may well
be, all of us, drinking in The World’s
End. The finely bedecked Crusader ship carrying the West’s intellectual and
social cargo is indeed tipping over the edge of an unexpectedly truncated flat
planet.

The planet is
called tolerance, and its length and breadth are running out as the ship
teeters on the brink. We do not tolerate Islam, of course. Our masters have
informed us that we will accept Islam or face the consequences of social
ostracism, loss of employment and even jail. Forced acceptance is not tolerance.
The elites, however, are not stupid, and they are well aware that Islam is not
a particularly pleasant experience for those on whom it is foisted. So it is
that we have London’s Muslim mayor, Sadiq Khan, telling us that we would just
have to get used to Islamic terrorism. He did this on a state-funded jolly to
the USA to shill for Hillary Clinton, whose plan to import tens of thousands of
Muslims has now been foiled.

And yet, at the
same time, Muslims have been rather quiet of late, at least in terms of the
terrorist spectaculars the Western elites’ increasingly authoritarian
provisional wing - aka the police - constantly tell us to expect, despite their
genius in averting these disasters. To be sure, Muslims are still sexually
assaulting Europe’s women, just as American blacks are still handing out
punishment beatings to ordinary white Americans, but there has been a distinct
lack of bombings and mass shootings.

As I mentioned a
few postcards ago, I find it hard to believe that Muslims could not strike when
and where they want to strike. The police are far more interested in Tommy
Robinson, Twitter and outreach than they are with shaking down potential
killers.

As I
mentioned, I am confident that I could organise an incident with a high kill
rate, were I so minded. So for radical Muslims, embedded as they are within
labyrinthine no-go areas – which the police deny exist – it should be a
cake-walk. So why the distinct lack of Bataclans and Nices and even 9/11s? I
have said before that I think the command structure for European Islamic terrorism
goes right to the top of the elites. It is they who are using Islam to
destabilise the West prior to the inevitable conflicts – long overdue – and resultant
authoritarian clampdowns. There is no need to push things, and with a spate of
recent elections and referenda, it might be expedient to keep it all quiet on
the Western front.

It may be, of
course, that Muslims themselves have accepted that they can play the long game
of demographic replacement and creeping cultural Islamisation, in cahoots with
political leaders as they are. They are metaphysically equipped not to require
the Reconquista within their own
lifetimes, as opposed to their godless hosts who must have everything now, for
there is nothing hereafter. The treatment of dissident kufr compared with the treatment of Muslim criminality can leave no
one in any doubt that Islamisation, at least sufficient to destabilise and
allow for anarcho-tyranny – the constitution of Traumaville – is the game plan
of the elites. It is increasingly rare to see refugees jailed for rape. Compare
this with the Scottish couple jailed for 12 and 8 months for festooning a
mosque with bacon. These sentences send out a very clear cultural semaphore.

The disparate
voices of the political Right see many hidden reasons why the EU and America
are treating Muslims as a protected species to be imported quicker than
oranges. Primarily, they see a pre-fabricated voting bloc for the nominal Left.
Islam seems to suit the Left. The ummah already
marches in ideological lockstep, its Sunni-Shia sectarian differences notwithstanding.
It is easily bribed with a range of social benefits and Americanised consumer
baubles. It is easily bought off with revanchist illusions, as mosques replace
churches on a politico-religious Monopoly board. There is only one problem with
this argument; politically speaking, there is only the Left. If they are of the
nominal Right, ‘opposition’ parties across the West are just as busy cosying up
to the many-headed Islamic outreach groups as the incumbents. In terms of
pragmatic politics, we are all Leftists now, and supposedly warring parties vie
with one another over Muslims in the same way divorced parents try to spend
more on the kids when it’s their weekend. Anyone who voted for Cameron in
part-concern over the Islamisation of the UK must be busy looking up the
dictionary definition of ‘Conservative’.

What of
Muslims considered simply as a component of immigration? We are told ad nauseam by our governing class – who
are, after all, the experts – that immigration is a Good Thing. But are Muslim
immigrants considered separately a benefit? Benefit seems to be an apt word
here, but not quite in its positive sense. A cursory glance over the internet
suggests that Muslims cost the UK more than they produce – and that’s without
policing and security costs – whereas Eastern Europeans produce or provide more
value than they take from the state. Of course, some of that money may find its
way back to Gdansk and Sofia, but there are indications that we should be
focussing on importing Catholic workers far more than Islamic ones.

Unless Trump
can single-handedly save the USA, and the ‘populism’ so hated by the elites and
their catamites in the media, academia and the public sectors can steer Europe’s
course astern, the ship of fools we are on is heading for the edge of the
world. And our problem is just what it was for the ancients. We don’t know what’s
out there.

Sunday, 4 December 2016

After almost four decades of work, I have come away from the experience
with what I believe is the answer as to why the West is apparently in a death
spiral; management. Not management per
se, management in and of itself. Management is necessary, to a certain
degree and after a certain fashion. My two favourite managers were both
middle-aged women, one in NHS Information, and for whom I later worked briefly
as a medical librarian, and the other in the large sub-editing department of a
lifestyle magazine when I drifted into production journalism. They both
succeeded and inspired their staff by what you might call an unwillingness to impede. They simply assessed each staff
member’s capabilities – in a refreshingly non-formal way, and encouraged them
to make use of those abilities for the team and the end product. But this is
far from being standard management practice, as we shall see.

I have worked for the NHS in four different capacities, and it was one
of these positions that first gave me the notion that it was a certain
management style that was to blame for the fact that, as we are constantly
being told by the guardians of Traumaville, this venerable institution is on
the brink of collapse. While we are on the subject, a worthwhile task for a
real journalist would be to expose the scandal of NHS diversity officers, but
don’t expect the Left-wing Lügenpresse to
be doing that any time soon. But I digress.

In 1990 I was faced with a quandary. Should I issue orders to begin the
ground war in the Gulf or not? Just kidding. I was approaching the end of my
funding to complete my Ph.D., and needed a job for a year, but not really any
longer than that. One evening, in a bar at the UK's second largest hospital, I
fell into conversation with a gentleman faced with a similar problem but from
the other perspective.

The hospital, like all hospitals, had to have a constant supply of
sterile supplies. As you are doubtless aware, you can’t wipe off a butter-knife
and use it to whip out an appendix. From the needles used to sew up flesh
wounds to the full silver tracheotomy pack, from the chiropodist’s nail-brush
to super-sterile toilet bowls for HIV sufferers, everything used invasively or
around an open-wounded or immune-compromised person cannot have a speck of
anything on it.

The man needed a go-between both to order at a ward level and liaise
with the Central Sterile Supplies Department at another hospital a few miles
away. Once a system was in place, the job would just require a flunky who could
unload a lorry and distribute boxes to wards and departments without getting a
nosebleed. As mentioned, the man estimated that it would take about a year.
Providence.

Day one, and I rolled in early and full of enthusiasm. I had carte blanche – or I thought then that I
had - to establish a system to ensure the efficiency improved from the 45% mark
at which I took over. By the time I left, a year later, it was 98% efficient,
and management undoubtedly took the credit for this when I was no longer around
to tell the truth. In fact, I succeeded despite management, not because of
management.

I had a simple plan for the first day. I would visit every ward and unit
and see whether there were any common problems I could prioritise. I didn’t
have to wait long. By coincidence, I began my round in the Neo-Natal Unit and
ended it in the Geriatric Ward. It felt like travelling through the entire life
cycle. What the first day told me was that ward sisters and nurses had one common
problem; the basic dressing pack.

The basic dressing pack is what it says it is. If you have ever gone to
an A&E Department (ER in the States) with a bad cut or other wound, they
will have used a basic dressing pack on you. It contained, then, needles,
thread, absorbent pads, dressing, disinfectant and two balls of cotton wool. It
was the latter that caused the problem.

Cotton wool is, as you know, made up of thousands of tiny strands of
cotton, difficult to see and liable to separate. Cotton wool therefore has a
tendency to ‘linting’ or leaving strands of itself behind which may not be
easily visible. On the skin that isn’t a problem, but in an open wound which is
then sutured, it will rot and can cause septicaemia. The sisters would have
preferred Medigauze, which is not susceptible to linting.

These were pre-internet times, but I sat down with medical supplies
catalogues and managed to find a basic dressing pack, with Medigauze, for less
than the price of the current supplier. I wasted no time in cancelling the
standing order and setting up a new one. Day one, and a palpable success. I
didn’t have to wait long for the call.

These were also pre-mobile phone days, and the little pager I wore went
off, displaying an internal number. I called it and found myself speaking to a
man with one of those managerial titles you forget almost immediately because
it doesn’t really mean anything. Could I come and see him?

After getting used to seeing nurses huddled in broom-cupboard-sized
rooms as they handed over shifts, I was surprised to find this manager sitting
regally in a spacious, sunlit, oak-lined office which could have doubled as a
squash court. Our interview began, and I had the first of many lessons in the
myth of management.

Apparently, I had changed the dressing pack supplier, he said smiling.
Indeed I have, I said, producing the amended figures and projected annual
saving. He gave me that look of simulated patience I have some to despise, the
look they all give in the face of unscripted initiative. Was I aware, he asked,
that I was supposed to consult the user group before making this type of
change? Ha! I had him. I shot back that I had already consulted the user group,
naively assuming that a group of people using the item in question was a user
group. It was not. He meant the User Group, comprised as it was of more
managers and cyphers who never came into contact with sick or injured people,
but earned a good deal more than those who did. Right, I said. I’ll give them a
call. I was then informed that a proposal would have to be put to the meeting
of the User Group. The next was scheduled for a month hence.

My order remained unchanged on this occasion. The man who had hired me
was senior to this buffoon in his giant office, and over-ruled him. But this
was just the beginning of my many, many fights with senior management
throughout a number of industries and capacities. I have learned that
management exists largely to impede initiative, to take part in time-wasting
exercises often disguised as ‘training’, to force those below them to duplicate
their work needlessly in the writing of reports, to provide mis- dis- and
non-information to those trying to work ‘below’ them, and otherwise to justify
their existence and generous salary and pension by creating work for others to
do. This toxic compound is particularly egregious in the public sector, but can
also be found in the private sector, as we shall see when I get to property management,
a breathtaking scam almost entirely supported by useless layers of incompetent
and irrelevant management. This is the first in an occasional series to
criticism of management. I hope it will help those unfortunate enough to have
to put up with and work under this pestilence.

Finally, I’ll look at how corporate and public sector management is a microcosm
of government, and how deliberate mismanagement operates at both levels and is
entirely intentional.

In the meantime, should you be unfortunate to work under a line manager,
team leader or other dim-witted appellation, do resist the impulse to kill
them. I only just succeeded.

Saturday, 3 December 2016

I well remember
May 2nd, 1997. I remember walking across London Bridge with tears in
my eyes. I remember having the – rather witty, I felt – thought that ‘I did not
know debt had undone so many’ as I saw the passing faces of the crushed
Londoners walking by me. It’s a reference to T S Eliot, as you may or may not
know. But things were about to change. I knew this in my almost bursting heart.

Tony Blair’s
Labour Party had been elected to government, you see, crushing the ‘Conservatives’
– they were and are no such thing – so convincingly that Blair himself had been
warning his own party against what he called ‘triumphalism’ in the days leading
up to this historic electoral triumph. I knew in my heart, as I crossed the famous
bridge that day, that things were going to change. And I was right. They did
change.

Blair beat John
Major, the stuffed shirt who had been craned into place once even the
notoriously dim Tory Party realized that Margaret Thatcher’s brand – for this
is what politicians are – had become too toxic. Major is a curious creature.
Apparently as home-spun a Tory as you could want, he fascinates me for two
phrases, or soundbites, as we must now call them in these thick and dim-witted
times.

Twenty years
ago, Major described an Englishman thus;

Step
on my foot and I will apologise. Step on my foot twice and I will apologise.
Step on my foot a third time and I will knock you down.

Those were the
days, my friend. Two decades later, Major could be found describing the dangers
of referenda as allowing ‘the tyranny of the majority’. Democracy, the greatest
white invention among myriad competitors, has become ‘the tyranny of the
majority’. How times change.

But what of the
man Peter Hitchens deftly calls ‘the Blair creature’? Anyone who has read the
seminal book by Peter Oborne, The Triumph
of the Political Class, will know what a repulsive human being he is, and
how equally disgusting and venal is his repulsive wife. Oborne has never been
sued for that book and, given that Blair is a lawyer, that means Oborne is
impeccably correct.

But being a
shit in politics is like lacking a foreskin in a synagogue. It’s not really
news. What of Blair now? He knows he can’t really return to front-line
politics. The British people may be politically illiterate – as was I on that
teary day in 1997 – but they know a cunt when they see one. But like his
soulmate George Soros, Blair has come to realise that the puppeteer has more
influence over events than the puppet.

Blair, who
recently received £220,000 for a twenty-minute speech, has just gifted a very
great deal of money for a new ‘institute’. If you see the word ‘institute’,
incidentally, reach for your revolver. Blair claims that his institute is not a
platform for a political return, but that it will offer ‘thought leadership’.
And I’m sure that is what he desires.

I always
admired Blair’s slippery use of the English language. Politicians today often
use the phrase ‘what I would say’. This is a Blairite linguistic construction,
and its subtle cunning lies in the fact that it is a conditional. What it
implies is unsaid. For example, ‘What I would say, but won’t.’ Or, ‘What I
would say, but would not mean’. It shows the slippery tactics of the lawyer. Blair
also famously claimed that his priority as Prime Minister would be ‘Education,
education, education’. And so it was. He did not lie. It’s just that, like my
own naïve self on that walk across London Bridge, people assumed he meant that
education would be the benefactor of a Labour government. Instead, although
most children will not now know their times tables – so fuddy-duddy and
conservative, don’t you know – they will know that racism - meaning white
criticism of non-whites – is the worst of all possible evils.

And so when
Blair says of his new enterprise – and it will make him money despite being
theoretically non-profit – that “I
care about my country and the world my children and grandchildren will grow up
in; and want to play at least a small part in contributing to the debate about
the future of both,” he means it.

Again, typical Blair. He tells no lies. His children and grandchildren will
grow up in a world of privilege and material comfort, far removed from the
rotting playground he helped to create. Of course he cares about that. That is
why he has amassed a blush-making amount of money to protect his spawn. And he does want to contribute to the debate
on, say, whether or not ordinary white people want their lives infected by
blacks and Muslims. He wants to contribute by closing that debate down. Here is
Blair on politics, in the context of his new toy;

“This new populism may differ in some respects between left and right — the
left anti-business, the right anti-immigrant — but in others, what is
remarkable is the convergence between them, especially around isolationism and
protectionism, in what is an essentially closed-minded approach to
globalisation and its benefits and to international engagement.”

This is pure sophistry, and Blair well knows that. Western whites are not
anti-immigration. We are anti-Muslim and deleterious black immigration. We
built this, and we do not want the gene pool dirtied.

White civilisation is about to kick back, and that is what spurs Blair and
his Bilderberg and Davos cronies to take action. Blair’s new institute is, apparently,
making an enemy of populism. Very well. Bring it on. We will not give up the
fight in the way that Blair’s baby boomer generation did. Along with the
Western elites and their financial enablers such as Soros, Blair would like to
see the death of the white man. But we are going to prove hard to kill.

Friday, 2 December 2016

The French
philosopher René Descartes was a worried man. His concern was that his memory
resembled a sheet of paper which was constantly being written over with his
experiences, with facts and events. Realising that it is in the nature of paper
eventually to become filled with writing, he avoided wherever possible being
told extraneous facts for fear that insufficient room would remain in his mind
for things of importance to this polymath. Thus, he hoped to avoid the fate of
Homer. Homer Simpson, that is. The yellow father of three noted the same
phenomenon, cheerfully asking of wife Marge whether she remembered ‘that time I
learnt how to make tequila and forgot how to drive’.

With Cartesian
concern on my mind (as it were), I now refuse to use Google to retrieve a
half-remembered fact. I am too likely to be distracted and, in addition, I wish
to keep my memory as supple as is possible for a middle-aged man, and not
reliant on modern prosthetics. So it is that I can remember only the sketchiest
detail of a BBC Radio 4 Today programme
interview which took place some years ago.

One of Today’s presenters was talking to a
religious spokesman of undoubtedly dusky hue who had been caught saying
something culturally - or rather multiculturally - contentious in a
conversation he erroneously believed had gone unrecorded. His repeated defence
was the (post-) modern default excuse; his words had been taken out of context.
As the interview progressed – very respectfully, as is the way when white BBC
staff talk to coloured people not white conservatives - it became clear that
the unfortunate man believed that ‘taken out of context’ was equivalent to ‘repeated
without my permission’. His confusion was increasingly apparent to the listener
and to the interviewer, who declined to point out the error, fearing perhaps
for community relations. The loose-tongued interviewee – a religious man, as noted
– and his fear of decontextualisation, bring us to another philosopher, himself
the son of a religious man.

In 1888, shortly
before his complete mental collapse, Lutheran pastor’s son Friedrich Nietzsche
wrote a book criticising Christianity, and by extension all religion. The short
work was not published until 1895, by which time Nietzsche had been insane for six
years, but it would go on to become something akin to the ‘dynamite’ Nietzsche
believed and wished his work to be. Nietzsche, for demonstrable reasons, is a
writer often quoted out of context, but this book is more cohesive than his
others, with their intentional lack of systematising, and has much to say to
the West of today, embroiled as it is in a problem which could be described as
religious. The book was Der Antikrist.

Like much of
Nietzsche, The Antichrist (or The Antichristian; the German signifies
both) is worth reading through quickly and returning to at leisure. Familiar
Nietzschean themes are present and correct: The Christian as homme de ressentiment; Christianity as
the religion of pity (which Nietzsche despised); the Church’s enervation both of
pragmatic Rome and of a culturally vibrant Europe. Nietzsche also targets the psychology of
Christianity as morbid, with ‘sombre and disquieting ideas… in the foreground.’
Men of the Christian kind, he writes, ‘have a vital interest in making mankind
sick.’ Religion in itself, he writes, is the enemy of life and thought; ‘Theological
blood is the ruin of philosophy.’

Nowadays, of
course, books critical of religion per se
tend to avoid one religion in particular. Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion is a good example.
Indeed, Nietzsche has more to say about Buddhism (of which he broadly approves)
than Islam, but the few mentions of ‘Mohammedans’ in The Antichrist repay inspection, even if read out of context.

Nietzsche’s work
is easy to take out of context because, with the aphoristic style of much of
his work, there is often no context. Look at the booklet of ‘Nietzsche’s sayings’
that Hitler had issued to his frontline troops. Nietzsche’s criticisms of the Teutonic
‘blond beast’ and his ridicule of the ‘beerish’ Germans were not included.

The
aphorism is an art form; think of the miniaturism of La Rochefoucauld, Blake or
Montaigne. There is something of the East about the form. But Nietzsche’s
aphorisms were not, or not only, a stylistic nicety. The appalling myopia the
philosopher suffered (along with a range of digestive disorders) forced him to
write with his nose practically touching the paper. With every line he wrote
threatening to bring on crippling migraine, much of his writing is
correspondingly gnomic, pithy, aimed to inflict its wound locally. Even given
this aphoristic style, however, it is still possible to quote Nietzsche out of
context. Most people recognise ‘that which does not kill me makes me stronger’,
from The Twilight of the Idols (and
revisited in Ecce Homo), but not
necessarily its parenthesised coda; ‘from the military school of life’.

In The Antichrist, Nietzsche finds in Islam
an ally in his destruction of Christianity, which he blames for destroying
Moorish culture. Continuing his familiar mantra of disgust with Christian
leaders, Nietzsche writes of them that;

“Nature
neglected – perhaps forgot – to give them even the most modest endowment of
respectable, of upright, of cleanly instincts… Between ourselves, they are not
even men… If Islam despises Christianity, it has a thousandfold right to do so:
Islam at least assumes that it is dealing
with men…”(Ellipses in original;
Italics added).

Nietzsche often described
his writing as ‘fish hooks’ and here he has landed, as we shall see, a monster.

Here in the
West, liberal, progressivist, and often feminist cheerleaders for Islam
conveniently forget that it is a religion which does not exactly show the male
character in its best light when it comes to the supposedly enlightened West,
while at the same time the Koran extols what were, at one time, considered to
be the manly virtues of strength, courage and ruthlessness. Now, the supposed advances
in male and female parity of opportunity made in the West are not exactly all
the rage in Arabic countries although, when it suits them, feminists will
defend the cultural rights of institutionalised misogyny against perceived
ethnocentricism. But what of those male traits which, while not necessarily a
feminist’s cup of tea, are now gaining ground – literally, in the case of
Islamic State - in the real world? Islam
at least assumes that it is dealing with men…

Bravery, for example, is
traditionally viewed as a manly virtue, its opposite as unmanly. It is also a
jihadist trait. This is a conundrum Socrates would have enjoyed. Mark Steyn criticises
George W. Bush for describing the 9/11 attacks as ‘cowardly’. As Steyn notes,
standing in a cockpit with your chest bared while the plane you are in screams
into a building may be indicative of many things, but cowardice is not one of
them. A touch of realism concerning Islam would be of much use to the modern
social justice warrior. Defend Islam, if you will, but be aware that whatever
concerns the modern jihadi has, stereotypical gender pronouns and transsexual toilets
are unlikely to figure prominently. In a feminised and emasculated Europe, our leaders’ declamations of jihadist acts are
sounding increasingly fey.

Take ex-UK Prime
Minister David Cameron’s appraisal of the killers of aid worker David Haines; “They are not
Muslims, they are monsters”. Nietzsche, famously, has advice for he who would
fight monsters; to beware that he does not himself become a monster. But by
putting that aphorism in context by completing it, we may glimpse the utter
vacuity of the Western, neutered response both to ISIS and to Islam; If you gaze too long into the abyss, the
abyss also gazes into you. The West’s response to ISIS – or whatever acronym
their brand people and our media have come up with this week – has truly been
abysmal.

If we take The Antichrist as representative of Nietzsche’s singular moral
system, it is difficult to imagine a more Nietzschean religion than Islam, at
least as practised by the dedicated butchers of Islamic State. If the principles
of cultural relativism are rigorously applied, we can’t say that the desert
decapitators are bad men. They have simply exercised their cultural prerogative
and, with Milton’s Satan, declaimed ‘Evil be thou my good’. Nietzsche’s view of
the good life in The Antichrist is
unequivocal;

“What is good? Whatever augments the
feeling of power, the will to power, power itself.”

Nietzsche’s will to power is much
misunderstood, usually by cultural pundits who have read no Schopenhauer, but
even in its comedic, Marvel-comic version, the ‘superman’ (Übermensch is more like ‘overman’ in English) is not a title we
would associate with the likes of Mr. Cameron and his political gauleiter class. To a new generation of
apprentice jihadists, however, ISIS more than fits the bill. It is said that
Mafia gangsters in Italy are adopting the look of jihadists. Not the religion,
you understand, but that most modern preoccupation, the image.

Television helps, of course, and by
extension YouTube and the other associated media. Iconic small-screen prestige
is yet another Western habit Islamists have adopted, along with training shoes,
rap music, and the ability to fly planes into skyscrapers. Perhaps they have
put into context Andy Warhol’s famous assertion that ‘in the future everyone
will be famous for 15 minutes’ by supplementing it with Warhol’s later
pronouncement – in A to B and Back Again
– that ‘in 15 minutes, everyone will be famous’.

The
family of one ISIS hostage paraded on TV screens in a gruesome version of
reality TV asked, in an appeal, that their relative be treated as a man of
peace. Unfortunately, their wish was not granted. Islamic State are not men of
peace. That is the whole point of their existence. They know, however, how to
deal with those who are. Much has been made of Osama bin Laden’s own aphoristic
pronouncement that when people see a strong horse and a weak horse they will
prefer the strong horse. Although a witless race-track platitude is hardly
oratory, the late Mr bin Laden had a point. And for Islamists, just as for
Nietzsche, history is about winners and losers, and about wars and warriors.

There is always a tiresome laziness about
talk of writers ‘coming back into vogue’ but, with Nietzsche, his relevance was
never ours to decide, was never an airport bookstore lifestyle choice. The
myopic German, with his military bearing, his fake Polish lineage, and his
impeccable manners, is a Cassandra for our crippled epoch. Islamic State assume
the West knows it is dealing with men. The West is not sure what that means any
more. When we view an ISIS video, we are forced, for context, to recall the
title of Nietzsche’s slim volume of autobiography; Ecce Homo. Behold the man.

The West is at
war; that is our context. Nietzsche may have had little to say explicitly about
Islam, but implicitly he tells us much about this cultish, mannish ideology.
From Human, All Too Human:

“For
the time being, we know of no other means to imbue exhausted peoples, as
strongly and surely as every great war does, with that raw energy of the
battleground, that deep impersonal hatred, that murderous cold-bloodedness with
a good conscience, that communal, organised ardour in destroying the enemy,
that proud indifference to great losses, to one’s own existence and to that of
one’s friends, that muted, earthquake-like convulsion of the soul.”

Wednesday, 30 November 2016

Some years ago,
starved of the company of women and forgetful of the potential and possibly
deleterious consequences of acting on that hunger, I took to the online dating
sites. I had a few adventures, met some nice women and some horrors, and
generally learned one of the lessons of the modern world; virtue signalling.
Psychologists call it the ‘self-serving bias’, and it is amazing how much human
utterance reduces to the formula; I am good. It’s like Freud’s primal sentence
passed through the meat grinder of the 60s Me generation. Now that virtue
signalling has become best practice for the Pansy Left, however – what we might
call the Be Like Me or Else generation – it is worth examining the anatomy of
virtue signalling.

One of the
ladies advertising herself on one of the sites had the usual list of her
virtues. It was the bog-standard inventory of her goodness and kindness, but it
was the very first auto-description that caught my eye. Gentle reader, this
beazel described herself, before all other attributes as;

Guardian-reading…

That’s right.
The first thing this young lady would have you know about herself is that she
reads the chattering classes’ anti-White newspaper of choice. She was white,
although I have had a few black girlfriends. See what I did there? Virtue signalling.
I was telling you I’m not a racist. I didn’t get in touch. She would have been
unlikely to harmonise in love’s sweet melody with a cove who has Mein Kampf on his Kindle.

It is to speak,
then, of virtue signalling that I have gathered you here today and, without
further fanfare, we will examine some of the necessities for the successful
virtue signaller.

Be Left wing. Shouldn’t
really have to tell you this, but this is a beginner’s guide and there are
still some of you who seem to believe that anyone who has a grudging respect
for Nigel Farage, or thinks black chaps can be a bit surly sometimes, or likes
to sneak a peek at Peter Hitchens’s column in The Mail on Sunday can be an acceptable human being and not
literally Hitler. Don’t fall at the first!

Know your enemy! Take
care out there, signallers! Don’t just signal away without checking your
target. You might think you hate homophobia, but what if it’s black men doing
the queer-hating? You see? Getting ethnocentric is a schoolperson error.
Nothing is bad in and of itself. It depends entirely on the colour or religion of
the person doing it. Black men on death row in Texas? Racism, pure and simple. Blacks
playing the knockout game in Detroit? Slavery! Your enemy is white,
heterosexual men, signallers! Tattoo that on your arm. And remember, virtue
signallers; white men only! White women
get a pass because they were busy being oppressed when white men built the
fascist state we are trapped in. So white women, even straight ones, are not
the enemy. Unless they’re Tory scum.

Wear a lot of badges and T-shirts. Nothing
says you are on the right side of history quite like spelling it out at the bus
stop every morning on the way to that job of yours. Colour your hair and have
facial piercings if possible, although some fascists employers might try to
oppress you for this. But the hair and piercings force people to look at you,
and this leads them on to read your I am
the 99% shirt. But take care! A This is what a feminist looks like T-shirt
may seem innocent and good, but what if you are visiting somewhere which may be
predominantly Muslim? Like London, or France? Caution, virtue signallers! Free Palestine buttons and stickers are
always a good fallback if in doubt.

Social media. Don’t
let up on Facebook, Twitter and other approved platforms not run by the fash,
where you might get up the wrong end of the playground due to words of three syllables
and above being used. Re-Tweet and re-post on Facebook everything you can,
provided it helps the cause. If you are not sure, let Mummy help you. If Daddy
is there, or might be there at some time in the foreseeable future, ask him. Or
ask ‘other Mummy’.

Avoid real people. Real
people don’t really understand virtue signalling as they have been oppressed by
white elites and think that goodness is shown by what you do and achieve rather
than what you say and claim and repeat. Virtue signalling should be done mostly
to other virtue signallers and, of course, the fascists and racists. Again,
take care with Muslims, black people, lesbians, queers, bisexuals,
transgenders, otherkin and all the many, many other approved identities. If you
praise one group too much, you may offend another. Spread the happiness and
absolute correctness of your position around.

Marches and demos. As
many as you can, people! If it means taking time off from your degree in Queer
Studies, or Women’s Studies, or Grievance Studies, or Fat Recognition Studies,
no matter. As you know, any degree with the word ‘Studies’ at the end
guarantees that you won’t actually have to study. You can take the afternoon –
or the year – off, and no one will notice. You’ll still get that degree and you’ll
still get that community organiser’s post, or that Saturday job at Tesco Local.

Police others. Actually,
we call it guiding or helping or instructing or correcting others now, because
the police are both racist and fascist. Really accomplished virtue signalling
means scoring points off other people by pointing out their wrongness. There
are people who still go on about ‘free speech’, which always means the ‘freedom’
to oppress other races and gender identifications. They are the ones who really
need your signals. Never forget; we are right because they are wrong!

Okay, virtue
signallers! You are ready to go! Get on that keyboard, get to that meeting
agreeing on a no-platform for the woman speaker who has converted from Islam to
Christianity – Yuk! – get on that march demanding free education so your
Slavery Studies degree doesn’t get you into debt with the criminal banksters,
and go, go, go! You. Are. Ready.